Soaring Platypus LLC
The studio
Piano lessons, in person
One-on-one classical piano instruction for children and teens, taught in person in San Mateo, California. The studio follows a patient, structured path from a student's very first notes to recitals.
San Mateo, California
Music education with two wings.
We are a small, family-run music company. One wing teaches classical piano to young students, in person. The other builds simple, distraction-free practice apps for iPad and iPhone. Both start from the same place: a student's first notes.
What we do
One idea, taught two ways.
The fundamentals deserve to be taught patiently, one clear step at a time, whether the student is sitting at a piano or holding an iPad.
The apps
Practice tools, built to match
Small, focused apps for iPad and iPhone, grown out of what works in the studio. Each one puts a single task on the screen and leaves the controls with the grown-ups.
- Sight-Reading Adventure for iPad and iPhone, now on the App Store
- No accounts, no ads, no tracking
Apps
Sight-Reading Adventure
Available on the App Store
A companion to the exercise book My First Sight-Reading Adventure, with every line of the book built in, so it works on its own. Each line appears on screen exactly as it does on the page: one or two staff lines, plain whole notes, and no clefs or bar lines to decode yet. Tap play, and the app plays the line back on piano while a voice sings the solfège names, so a student can check by ear what they have just read and played.
There is nothing else on the exercise screen. Tempo lives in a settings screen for the grown-ups. The app never listens through the microphone, never connects to the internet, and never asks anyone to sign in.
- Devices iPad and iPhone
- Requires iOS 17 or later
- Data collected None
- Accounts or ads None
About the name
Why a platypus?
The name is odd but memorable. It reminds us of flying, and that the point of teaching well is to let students take off on their own. A platypus is an unlikely assembly of parts that turns out to work: a duck's bill, a beaver's tail, an otter's feet, and, against every expectation, eggs. So is this company, founded in 2026 by a husband and wife who both play and teach piano: one has spent years teaching children to read their first notes, and the other is also an engineer, who builds the tools the studio wished existed.
What we hold to
- Fun and fundamentals, together. Playing for fun is the best motivation there is, but it has to go hand in hand with the fundamentals: reading, ear training, theory, and technique. That is what lets a student enjoy the instrument for life and grow into harder music. Learning fundamentals is not always fun and takes patience, and that is exactly where our ideas for practice tools come from.
- Nothing to fiddle with. Our apps put one task on the screen and keep the settings with the grown-ups.
- Your data is yours. Nothing you do in our apps is sent to us: no accounts, no ads, no tracking. Settings and progress stay on the device. This website has no analytics and sets no cookies.
Contact
Write to us.
Questions about an app, a lesson, or the company? One address reaches both of us.
support@soaringplatypus.com